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'Media' - Illustration by Eldad Druks
Illustration by Eldad Druks - www.druksgraphics.com

new dec04 Chapter 6 - Where's Wally Hope? - You'd imagine the house to be black. There's this image of Crass: screeching lyrics over a relentless backdrop of screaming noise; uncompromising black and white graphics, stark pictures of pain and death and decay; anger bordering on hysteria. Instead of which you walk into Paradise.

new dec04 Chapter 7 - Stonehenge - Every human being carries a myth. It is more than a story, it is more than a fiction, it is the sense of self-identity. It is who we are. It is culture. Without the myth we cannot live. We cannot explain ourselves. The myth is the living culture within us.

Fierce Dancing - The reviews

'If you think an alternative lifestyle means free-range eggs from the supermarket and lead-free petrol for the company car, read this book. Read it anyway. A paperback original, it costs a fraction of the price of a Glastonbury Festival ticket and will pass the time waiting for your case for obstruction to come up in the Newbury magistrates' court. It is an abuser's guide to what might once have counted as the Counter Culture and can now be summarised as A Bunch of Crusties Who Get Up Late. C J Stone (make that C J Stoned, to take account of his mental state while conducting his researches) is the best guide to the Underground since Charon ferried dead souls across the Styx ... He's unbeatable when he walks the walk and talks the talk with some loopy conversationalists. They open up to him over a beer, joint or tab ... Stone joins enthusiastically in their road protests, free festivals, anti-Criminal Justice Act demos and pow-wows in teepees. He dances in woods to illicit sound systems ... Each chapter has a wonderful life of its own with a terrific cast of characters. Even when he does not go out auditioning for them, his raw material knocks on his door. The man who comes to repair his computer turns out to have encountered an angel in Glastonbury Abbey.'
Independent on Sunday

'Wally' - Illustration by Eldad Druks
Illustration by Eldad Druks - www.druksgraphics.com

'The book has the ferocity and passion of a clenched fist, yet still manages insights into the human condition, beautifully observed theories on existence, and some laugh out loud moments of humour taken straight from real life situations... The most topical depiction of protest and alternative living you are likely to read this decade. A chapter entitled 'Beanfield' is described as 'the dark heart of the book', it illustrates police brutality and Establishment intervention on the premise that whatever they can't control is out of control. It is a heart wrenching chapter ... A book like Fierce Dancing should cause revolution ... An exhilarating reminder of the state of Britain today.'
City Life

Fierce Dancing - The reviews... a few more

'Wry, acute, and sometimes hellishly entertaining essays in squalor and rebellion.' Herald

'If you are looking for coming cultures of resistance, you'll find them here ... C J Stone has written a painfully honest account of life on the other side of a workaday consumer society. He is an unashamed old hippie - a commune-dweller in the early 1970s, possessor of a Mondragon-type goatee - yet has raved and eckied with the youngest of them in search of continuity between undergrounds then and now.'
New Statesman and Society

'This book is one of the few records of what life in the counterculture is like, and, more importantly, demonstrates that its supporters did not come from nowhere ... brilliantly written ... provides a rare historical insight into the unbroken development of alternative culture.'
Q Magazine

'Book of the year, in our humble opinion'
http://www.urban75.com/

Fierce Dancing

Fierce Dancing

Fierce Dancing

Trip to Glasgow

The AA man says: "Warrington is the fourth largest city in the UK."

"Oh really," says Kodan, as if he's interested.

"Yes. First London. Then Birmingham. Then Manchester. Then Warrington." It's like he's saying "Manchester nil, Bolton 4" only with Warrington in the place of Bolton. Warrington matters, it means something.
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“It can move mountains, but not a 1976 Fiat Camper with a seized engine.

I knew something was wrong at the petrol stop just North of Birmingham. The entire back of the machine was splattered with oil. This wasn't just a some messy old engine that smoked a bit too much, it was coming apart at the seams.”
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This link is to an unpublished, longer version of the first chapter of Fierce Dancing. Not to say it’s any better, or any good at all, in fact, just that it’s different...

There's something about alcohol. It leaves you in a kind of spiritual agony. I felt as if I'd been exiled from the Kingdom: cast out, rejected, and no hope of returning. I bitter about God. I hated God. I merely wanted to blaspheme.
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My First Rave

I went to my first rave sometime in 1991. Actually I never considered I was going to a "rave". I thought I was going to a party. Which is what it was. A big party, in the open air. The term "rave" is something of a media invention. What's a rave? A sound-system, some lights, some backdrops, people getting off-their-faces. Except for the context -and, to some degree, the music- there's hardly any difference between a rave and a disco. Except that "disco" as a term has become profoundly unfashionable. Only slightly more unfashionable than "rave".
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“ Oz and Nik share one trait: they both have lopsided noses. But if Oz is the boss in the party scene, Nik is the boss in the bedroom. She tells him what to do, how to do it and when. That's the sort of conversations us three have. Nik loves to talk about sex. Oz says he's not interested in it, and he compares it to food. But he likes his food. He piles his plate up in a mound and sets to it with a relish.”
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